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Wow! After half a century, Walt Disney is making wildlife documentaries again. And the star of the company's first film -- "The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos" -- is the Lesser Flamingo of Tanzania's Lake Natron.
The film premiered in Paris this week and is now on release in France and Switzerland. It will be on general release in more than 50 countries, including the U.S., in 2009. The trailer is above.
According to BirdLife International, three-quarters of the world population of Lesser Flamingos live in East Africa, and many depend on Lake Natron, an Important Bird Area, as a breeding site. The Tanzanian government and an Indian company have proposed building a large-scale industrial plant that would extract soda ash from the lake’s water via pipes to be built across the surface of the lake. New roads and rail lines would also be built to serve the soda-ash plant.
Because it takes very little disturbance to cause a flamingo breeding colony to abandon its nests, BirdLife believes the development and associated infrastructure will displace and scatter Lake Natron's flamingos, and the organization has launched a campaign to stop it. --C.H.
Flamingos are such beautiful birds! I'll go ahead and set my DVR for this program and keep an eye out for it.
Posted by: Mining Guide | February 25, 2009 at 04:31 PM